After doing many x86 installations I'm finally playing around with the sparc. Before I do anything too crazy I want to try with my Ultra 2. I'm starting to regret it though since its so slow. I'm doing a Kernel compile right now...(4th time...I can't seem to get the kernel under 3.6 megs )

Similar story with me, really - got fed up with x86 hardware and decided that there had to be something better

Perused eBay for a half hour or so and managed to win a rather neat little Ultra 10 440MHz. The rather tired-sounding 9.1GB HDD was replaced with a pair of Seagates (40GB and 80GB 7200RPM beasties) and Gentoo run up.

The whole thing went from stage one to running system in a day and a bit and is presently running rings around the responsiveness of Solaris.

Just so you know, IMHO the Gentoo install is approximately 100 times less painful than FreeBSD / NetBSD - both of which have yet to muster a proper console driver...

Going along the lines of odd hardware, I've also just bought an HP C180 PA-RISC box - should be fun

currently running gentoo diskless, booting kernel over tftp and nfsrooted. next investment is *definitely* more RAM for this guy... he kinda crawls due to the measely 128MB in him... sigh._________________overlays - Use at your own risk. File bug reports on this stuff and i'll kick you in the junk. Ask me before asking upstream if these fail. I mean it. No, really.

Notes:
1. All sun4u kernels have Keith Weslowski's semctl kernel patch installed.
2. antaresia is under construction, and not networked with the others.
3. For sadistical: After you build the kernel, do you ...?

I've got a random number of Sunblade 1000 with dual UltraIII 900mhz with 1.5 Gb of RAM. I say random because the project that they were used on died so they were just stored in my office. I've started playing around with them installing gentoo and such. Now that they have gentoo on them all the sudden people are interested in using them again haha. Oh well. Probabably for the best. I don't think my boss would have been happy that I was using a $15K machine as a nethack server, but its not like anyone wanted the things then.

I'm a n00b to sparcs. I picked up a Sun Ultra 1 at Defcon in Las Vegas.
It's a NASA handme down I think.

143 mhz 64mb of RAM.

And i've yet to compile a kernel small enough to boot with SILO. it's sad i think it must take 8 hours to compile the kernel. Shouldn't it be possible to compile a kernel on a faster machine then just ftp onto the sparc box?

Done a lot x86 installations. Have done a lot of x86 hardware troubleshooting. Basicly I've had it with x86. Th SS20 I received as a gift was a warm welcome to experiment with Sparc.

Nowadays it is equiped with 2 170 MHz cpu's and max RAM ( I found a really nice offer on ebay). Only thing it is missing is a larger HD and a second ethernet card. It is not running gentoo but openbsd.
As soon as it has a second eth it will be be functioning as firewall/router.

Second Sun was also a gift..and a really nice gift: Ultra60 with dual 450MHZ UltraSparcIIi and 512 MB RAM + 19 GB seagate scsi disc. Oh and a nice 20" SUn monitor.
It had gentoo installed. But unfortunatly the installer of Solaris 9 wants to use the whole disc. Gentoo has been re-installed yesterday and I'm making it ready for replacing my current Athlon 900 desktop.

Unfortunatly I'm getting a lot of access violation problems on /usr/lib/perl/5.0.0/base.pm with a lot of differen packages.

It will take a while to get Gentoo on the Ultra60 ready for replacing my current desktop, but it will be worth the wait. Finally I can dump that lousy x86.